Really special effects

Director opted for authenticity over CGI in The Fall.

June 5, 2008|By DAVE KEHR The New York Times

In this era of digital special effects, we've become accustomed to the idea that by manipulating pixels on a computer screen, filmmakers can show us practically anything in a more or less convincing manner.

And yet The Fall - an independent feature film from Tarsem Singh Dhandwar, a veteran music video and commercial director who uses Tarsem as his professional name - is full of sights that provoke genuine astonishment. There's an underwater shot of an elephant swimming gracefully overhead, a palace courtyard built out of interlocking staircases that might have been designed by M.C. Escher, a village clinging to a mountainside where all of the buildings seem to have been individually painted in subtly different shades of inky blue.

These images amaze precisely because they are quite evidently real, bursting with the life and detail that elude even the most advanced digital artist.

"I decided it wasn't going to be CGI," said Tarsem, using the industry shorthand for computer-generated imagery. Referring to his only previous feature, the psychological thriller The Cell (2000), Tarsem added: "I had enough of that in my first film, as much as I enjoyed it. I decided in this one that the art direction was going to be in the landscape and in the costume design and nothing else."

The Fall, which opened Friday, is really two stories told in two different styles, intertwined in the telling.

Story A: In a Los Angeles hospital in 1915, movie stuntman Roy Walker (Lee Pace), paralyzed as a result of a fall off a railroad trestle, befriends another patient, Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), a 5-year-old girl who broke her collarbone while picking oranges with her immigrant parents. Roy begins to tell the girl a wild adventure tale, though it slowly becomes clear that he has a hidden agenda. His story is a crafty way of manipulating the child into stealing the morphine he needs to commit suicide.

Story B: As Roy unfolds his tale, he weaves himself, the child and their shared troubles into a swashbuckling epic about a masked hero, the Black Bandit (Pace again). With the help of an escaped slave (Marcus Wesley), an Indian mystic (Julian Bleach), an Italian explosives expert (Robin Smith) and the naturalist Charles Darwin (Leo Bill), the Black Bandit fights to rescue his lady love, Princess Evelyn (Justine Waddell), from the clutches of the evil Governor Odious (Daniel Caltagirone). In The Wizard of Oz tradition, the characters are all drawn from the hospital population.

The Fall is based on Yo Ho Ho, a Bulgarian film directed by Zako Heskija, which had set Tarsem to thinking about the manipulative nature of storytelling when he saw it in 1981. "Earlier, before recorded music or film, you told a story depending on the crowd you had in front of you," he said. "If you have five people you told it with a certain pizazz. If you had 25,000 people you told it a different way."

"I realized I was doing that all the time," he continued, referring to the meetings he had been having with studio executives.

Tarsem, 46, who was born in India and grew up in Tehran, acquired the rights to the film, and, he said, "started to collect visuals."

"It took me about 16 years," he added. In the meantime, he continued to direct commercials for Levi's, Nike and MTV, as well as music videos for groups including Green Day and R.E.M.

A long search for a girl unaffected enough to play the leading role ended when a casting director found Untaru in Romania. Tarsem went to South Africa, where a Victorian-era hospital had been put at his disposal.

Then he started work on the fantasy sequences, saving time and money by piggybacking on his commercial assignments. "I shot first in India, then in Namibia. The crew got smaller and smaller. I would only do adverts in areas where I wanted to shoot: China, Argentina, Bali."

Director David Fincher (Zodiac, Seven), who met Tarsem on the music video circuit and has remained a friend, is listed as "presenting" The Fall along with a fellow music video alumnus, filmmaker Spike Jonze. Fincher said of Tarsem's approach: "He told me when he was going in that 'my production value is going to be the earth; I'm going to use the entire world as my backdrop.'

"I was like, 'What does that mean?' and then I saw that montage where he literally covers 10 countries. I kept asking him, 'That's a matte painting, right?' And he'd say, 'Nope, that was a real place,' and he'd explain where that place was and how he'd found it on some Pepsi commercial or some Audi commercial that he'd done."

Jonze added: "Had a studio done what he did, it would have been an $80 million movie. But he's so experienced at it and knows people in all these countries and knows how to shoot with a tiny crew. That's how he got away with it. But still, he spent his own money, which is insane."

On the insanity issue, Tarsem concurs: "It had to be made by somebody at a mad junction in his life."